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Updated: June 30, 2025
"It would ruin all your fine opportunities in this family." Dickory smiled with a certain sarcastic hardness. "I don't mean," said he, "that I am going to hack at him with a sword, because neither he nor I properly know how to use swords, and after the wonderful practice that I have seen, I would not want to prove myself a bungler even if the other man were a worse one.
My lord, you and I have read Machiavel together. It is true I am but a bungler in Italian, and your lordship was generally obliged to interpret for me. Your translation I dare say was always scientifical, but I was seldom so happy as to see either grammar or sense in it.
Marwood had not the almost patriarchal air of benevolent respectability which his predecessor Calcraft had acquired during a short experience as a family butler; but as an executioner that kindly old gentleman had been a sad bungler in his time compared with the scientific and expeditious Marwood. The Horncastle shoemaker was saving, businesslike, pious and thoughtful.
“What are you trying to do? Are you trying to teach me something about this poisoner of wells?” shouted Herr Carovius, and his face took on the enraged expression of a hunchback who has just been taunted about his deformity. “Does the professor imagine that he knows better than I do who this Richard Wagner is, this comedian, this Jew who goes about masked as the Germanic Messiah, this cacaphonist, this bungler, botcher, and bully, this court sycophant, this Pulchinello who pokes fun at the whole German Empire and the rest of Europe led about by the nose, this Richard Wagner?
And that lazy wholesale disapprobation of living writers, so common and convenient, what does it do but injure all reverence for parents and teachers, when the young find out that the poet, who, as they were told, was a bungler and a charlatan, somehow continues to touch the purest and noblest nerves of their souls, and that the author who was said to be dangerous and unchristian, somehow makes them more dutiful, more earnest, more industrious, more loving to the poor?
He may be a wise man in every other relation, a shrewd man, a far-seeing and even a cunning man, but in this relation that of his own honour, his own fame, his own safety he is certain to be a blunderer, a bungler, and a fool. Such is the revenge of Nature, such is God's own vengeance! Philip was walking from Ballure House to Elm Cottage.
But you are right: I am a coward and a bungler, because I can create no life. I give myself to you and him." Violet stood long before the statue of Psyche, cold as the marble, with hot fires raging within. "He loves me, loves me as Harry does! His love is deeper, perhaps, higher, perhaps. He was not above me, he lifted me above himself, looked up to me! He dies for me!"
"The bungler, the greenhorn!" he exclaimed out loud, as so often in such self-communings. "He did not know how to make a good use of his opportunities. Or the Marchesa was hanging round his neck all the time. Or perhaps he took her as a next-best, when Marcolina, the philosopher, the woman of learning, proved unattainable!" Suddenly a thought struck him.
For the Creator was not such a bungler as to confine all feminine beauty to a single instance, but scattered it universally, since almost every woman in the world, no matter what her face be like, shares in the wonderful fascination exerted over men by the shape essential to her sex, which is far the most important thing of all, being general instead of special, as every woman seen dimly in the dark, or at a distance, or with her face hidden by a veil, will prove, being then above all most attractive when her face cannot be seen at all: as the story that I told thee of the ugly lady, not long ago, shows, if thou hast not forgotten it.
"And you're so hopelessly not an artist that, so far from being able to imagine a thing and make it seem true, you're going to make even a true thing seem as if you'd made it up. You're a miserable bungler. And it's like my luck."
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